Chapter 5
There are two types of pilots who fly for Formula Zero: those who excel at on-planet racing, and those who prefer off-planet tracks.
On-planet courses go over, around, and through cities on Earth, Luna, and Mars.
They’re hairpin turns between the eightieth floors of skyscrapers and tight loops around bridges.
On-planet racing requires precision, dexterity, and the innate ability to judge exactly how fast you can take each element of the course without losing control.
That team was Elemental Machines, and Clarke is an off-planet racer.
Off-planet racing is a beast all its own.
The paddock is a space station, the course gets built around it, and because the designers don’t have to respect the physical landscape of a city, the track moves during the race.
After every lap, the race director changes something: the angle of a turn, the length of a straightaway, the number of cutbacks in a chicane.
There’re a finite number of variables, and the teams get a chance to practice them all ahead of time, but it’s thrilling to start a new lap not knowing exactly what lies ahead.
Clarke finds it thrilling, anyway.
“Doesn’t matter how many times we do this, it’s still weird,” Thierry says, standing outside Clarke’s bay in the Elemental garage and peering down the pit lane, toward the wall of silvery light that divides the pit, garage, and paddock from the vacuum that surrounds Lion’s Head Cascade track.
“I could just walk through that, and I’d be dead. There’s nothing stopping me.”
“Common sense?” Amira offers from her spot at the engineering station, the long row of computers down the middle of the floor dividing Clarke’s and Matthew’s halves of the garage. “No, sorry, forgot who I was talking to.”
“Hey, I’m not the one who actually likes racing out here.” Thierry steps back into the garage with a shudder. “Clarke’s the lunatic. I’m having a situationally appropriate reaction of fear and awe.”
“You don’t have to like it, you just have to fly in it six times a year without looking like you’re going to crap your pants. You might want to do something about that, by the way.”
Thierry scowls and tosses himself into the chair next to Clarke. “I don’t have to put up with this.”
“Wish you were putting up with it somewhere else,” Amira says. She’s one of the only other people still hanging around this late on a Friday night, tinkering before tomorrow’s qualifying session.
Race weekends all follow the same rhythm.
Thursday is media, Friday is practice, Saturday is qualifying and lower circuit races, and Sunday is the F0 Grand Prix.
It’s equal parts exhausting and exhilarating, and Clarke usually lands firmly on the exhilarating side during off-planet weekends when she can toy with the edge of being reckless and really open up her kickdrive on straightaways, but all she feels now is a growing sense of apprehension.
It’s not the track. The track is amazing.
Lion’s Head Cascade gets its name from the artificial starfall constructed at the far end of the course, which throws dazzling, ever-shifting light across the turns and inversions.
It’s possibly Clarke’s favorite of the off-planet sites.
She placed third here last year, earning her first (and only, so far) F0 podium.
If she could trade this year’s ship for last year’s, the one she did so well in, she’d probably feel a hell of a lot better.
She actually proposed that earlier this week, when the team met up at Elemental Headquarters on Luna to prep for the weekend.
Amira backed the suggestion, but Yves said no.
Not enough time for the crew to brush up on the old model, he’d said. We can talk about it again after break.
Clarke doesn’t want to wait until after the break.
She doesn’t want to fly out into the beauty of the cascade in a ship she doesn’t feel confident in.
The team rebuilt it after the disaster at Tiresias, wholly replacing almost the entire back end of the ship, and it handled fine during open practice today, but practice only shows so much.
“Seriously,” Amira continues, jabbing at Clarke with her elbow. “It’s one thing for you to bring your spy into our house, but does he have to be so loud?”
“I’m not loud,” Thierry protests, offended. “And what would I be spying on? The secret to how Elemental keeps failing in new and exciting ways?”
“Thierry,” Clarke chides halfheartedly.
“The spy has a point.” Amira pushes her glasses up into her mass of gray-streaked dark hair and rubs her eyes, then looks at Clarke through her fingers. “Is it helping you to have him here? I can call security.”
“It’s helping,” Clarke says while Thierry squawks at the empty threat. “Thanks.”
It really does help, having Thierry around.
Clarke didn’t make many friends in F0 last year (Yves and Naomi strongly encouraged Clarke to bond with only Matthew, not pilots from other teams, and Clarke came in with a chip on her shoulder regardless), but when Thierry Allaire joined Enclave Alpha this year for his rookie season, he fell in with Clarke like a bonus younger brother to the biological one she already has.
Pilots aren’t supposed to be in one another’s garages during race weekends, but Amira usually lets it slide.
It helps that Thierry’s impossible to dislike.
Thierry yawns and drops his head onto Clarke’s shoulder. The chairs at the engineering station are not designed for that; he has to stretch one long leg out across the next stool over to keep from toppling both of them to the ground. “Are you almost done driving yourself nuts? I want to sleep.”
“No one’s making you stay,” Clarke points out.
He cracks one eye open, a slit of hazel and white against his dark brown skin. “You just said I’m helping! And I don’t trust that you’ll go to the hotel at a reasonable hour if I don’t personally escort you there.”
Clarke’d bristle at the implication that she’s not responsible enough to put herself to bed the night before she has to race, but he’s got a point.
Not about Clarke not going to sleep on time, but about there being nothing else Clarke can do to impact the weekend’s outcome.
She’s been studying track variables since dinner, but the sunlamps space stations use to promote healthy circadian rhythms have almost gone dark and her brain is saturated with ship specs and course variable possibilities.
“Yeah, okay,” she says, logging out. “Let’s go.”
Lion’s Head Cascade started as a tourist attraction.
A company built the starfall and a small, resort-style space station with a few dining options.
As it grew in popularity, the demand for lodging and shopping and other leisure activities increased, so they started adding on to the original structure.
These days, Lion’s Head is roughly the size of Terran Manhattan.
Very few people live on Lion’s Head who aren’t staff, but when the station is close to capacity for a big event (like a Formula Zero race), there are almost two million on-station, and another quarter million or so on ships docked at good spectator viewing points around the track.
There are decks on the station that never really sleep, casinos and clubs and restaurants open at all hours, but Formula Zero booked up whole hotels in one of the quiet zones.
Clarke and Thierry meander through a green space on their way there, Terran trees and Martian crystal flowers and Lunar shrubbery all reaching toward the overhead panels that give the illusion of sky at dusk.
“I chatted with Julian for a minute at pilot roundup,” Thierry says after a few minutes of silence.
Clarke has a lot of experience not reacting outwardly when F0 people drop Julian’s name around her. She puts up her inner walls, bracing for whatever comes next. “Oh?”
“He thinks you’re mad at him.”
Cracks appear in Clarke’s walls at the implication that Julian’s putting Thierry in the middle. “Did he ask you to talk to me about this?”
“No! I just—” Thierry chews on his lip. The overheads shade further down, switching to a full night scene featuring twin moons. “He mentioned it. That’s all.”
Clarke pushes her anger away with both hands. “I get that you’re trying to help. And if you’re hanging out with him, that’s great—I’m not about to tell you who you can and can’t be friends with—but you can’t get involved in the me-and-Julian thing.”
“Are you ever even going to explain what the you-and-Julian thing is, though?” Thierry wheedles. “Because some days you’re worse than Delphine and Oliver.”
“You take that back right now,” Clarke says, only half joking.
Oliver Bright is Delphine’s partner pilot at Provenance.
They used to be married, but their divorce was finalized between this season and last. It was not amicable, despite the Provenance PR team working overtime to make it seem like it was.
“We’re perfectly civil compared to them. ”
“A lack of open hostility does not a pleasant work environment make,” Thierry says, leading the way out of the green space and into the hotel sector, where aerotrains in gravity tunnels offer quick transport to the hotels.
Elemental and Enclave are in the same hotel, so they share a train.
Thierry seems to be done talking for the night, tipping his head against a seat and closing his eyes, but something he said is eating at Clarke.
“Julian really told you that he thinks I’m mad at him?”
“This is me not getting involved,” Thierry says, pointing a finger at his face.
“I’ll give you a free pass, for the next five minutes. What did he say?”
“Something about a fight you got in after the press conference last race?”
“It wasn’t a fight.”
“Did you or did you not call him your enemy?”
Clarke is both embarrassed that she said it and ticked at Julian for repeating it. “Yeah, but it’s—he is. We all are.”
Thierry opens his eyes. “We’re competitors. There’s a difference. And I know you know that, because you’re friends with me, and our teams are way more directly competitive with each other than either of us is with Chronicle. If you can manage it with me, you can manage it with Julian.”
“You and me don’t have years of history.”
“No, because you and Julian were so wrapped up in each other—and Connor—when we were all in Juniors that you barely noticed the rest of us existed.”
He’s teasing, but it sends a bolt of shame through Clarke. “I’m sorry. I never meant to make you feel like—”
“Oh, stop. I didn’t pay attention to the kids who were younger than me, either,” Thierry says as the train glides to a halt.
The doors open, letting Clarke and Thierry out into the lobby of their hotel.
There are a handful of people scattered about in pairs and trios, all in F0 colors.
“My point is that I think you still care about him, because I don’t see how you could not after everything you’ve been through together.
And right now he kinda thinks you hate him, and that’s hurting him, so you should do something about it. ”
They walk toward the elevators. Clarke tries to shove her thoughts into order, but she wasn’t planning on having to grapple with this today.
Her brain’s full of tomorrow’s qualifying rounds, her unpredictable ship, and the state of her contract.
“It’s not something I can just fix. Every time we try to talk, it hasn’t gone well. Historically.”
Thierry rolls his eyes as his elevator arrives. “You were friends for more than ten years. You were friends across the damn asteroid belt when he was still living in the colonies. Don’t tell me you can’t have a conversation with the guy.”
Clarke’s heart twists, thinking of those days before everything got complicated. “We’re not those kids anymore.”
“Well, good.” Thierry steps into his elevator, pivots on his heel, and gives Clarke a devious look. “Because my next suggestion is to just sleep with him already and get it out of your system, but that only works now that everyone’s an adult.”
“Thierry!”
“What? It’s what I would do. Gotta break the tension somehow. Okay, good night!”
The door closes on his cheery farewell. Clarke resolutely keeps her face turned toward the elevators so no one can see the shocked heat in her cheeks until her own lift arrives and she can scurry out of sight.